Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

My cumulative ecclesiology page, a list of questions and, at some point, discussion and answers in the style of Aquinas’s Summa, is here. I will add the post below to it.

Should books be sold in a church?

Should there be commercial advertising in a church bulletin?

Should money be collected in an offering during worship?

Should worship be beautiful?

Should children have rattles and drums to use during hymnsinging in worship?

Should a church have songs to which the congregation does not sing along?

Should there be clapping after someone has sung or played during worship?

Should children run the service sometimes?

Should there be patronage in choosing a minister?

Should the KJV Bible be used?

Should a person bring his own bible to church?

Should a church have pew bibles?

Is it wrong if members of the congregation do not dress formally, e.g. in jacket and tie?

Is it wrong if members of the congregation dress sloppily, e.g. in shorts and t-shirts?

Should women wear hats in church?

Jerusalem Post via National Review

Two weeks after Israel’s alleged bombing raid in Syria, which some
foreign reports said targeted North Korean nuclear material, the UN’s
nuclear watchdog elected Syria as deputy chairman of its General
Conference on Monday.

(more…)

“Intelligence in the Classroom: Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them” by Charles Murray in the WSJ, is a good article. The subtitle says it all. In designing a school system, we need to think about children’s potential, not just what we’d like for them to be able to learn. Wherever we set a threshold, some children aren’t going to be able to make it. (more…)

align= left width= "240" >

Note the cement slots on the wall, put there to hold air conditioners. I haven’t seen that elsewhere than Taipei.

Here are some observations from my trip to Taipei, Formosa:

1. Lots of the balconies are barred in, even though crime is now low.
2. Bicycles are usually locked, but often to themselves and with thin cables.
3. A surprising number of people speak English, and good English too. Not all taxi drivers do, though.
4.Instead of drinking fountains, there are water dispensers (hot and cold) which use paper cups that you open up from being flat.
5.There are not vending machine for drink everywhere, as you would find in Japan.
6. The department stores are very expensive, except for their food.
7. Restaurants are not particularly cheap.
8. People are very friendly.
9. The vegetation is lush and beautiful.
10. There are wide main roads. There are lots of trees planted too.
11. Motorcycles are everywhere- more of them than bikes.
12. The streets are labelled in English. So is the produce and meat in random grocery stores!
13. There are wild mountains in the middle of the city. The city extends for miles, with no single center or single rich area. It is like Los Angeles in both those ways.
14. I didn’t notice any factories.
15. On Sundays, lots of motorcycles had mama in back, daddy driving, and a child in front of him.
16. Ming pottery really is a lot better than what came before or after. New techniques were discovered, but used simply.

Here are some travel tips I should have thought about before visiting Taipei:

1. Buy a guidebook in advance.
2. Buy a good map in advance– a plastic one, for use in rain and hard
   to wreck.

3. Bring rubbers for your shoes. They are useful for traction
   too, and for keeping off mud when hiking in leather shoes.

4. Bring a baseball cap for rain and sun.
5. Bring moleskin for feet (I had that).
6. Bring a compass (I had that).
7. Bring pens.
8. Get take-out food from a stall or grocery, to avoid spending time
   sitting in restaurants.

9. Bring plastic silverware (I had that).
10. Bring bug lotion (I had that).
    

I came across The Gourmet Cello in East-Central Taipei and thought of SW from Perth.

Here are two history-book recommendations from Three Hierarchies: (more…)

How can you get experience of recreational sailing even if you live in Kansas City?

Put on casual clothes and take a broom into a shower stall. Turn on the cold water and start ripping up $20 dollar bills. Every five minutes, hit yourself over the head with the broomstick. Continue until you’re unconscious or out of money.

Why women should pay less tax by Alberto Alesina and Andrea Ichino at the Financial Times, argues that women should pay a lower income tax rate because their labor supply is more sensitive to aftertax wages. That’s true as far as it goes.

Since we are talking about people and not goods, one needs to worry about whether such a policy undermines other social goals. In fact it does not, and this is why social activists should favour it as well. Increasing the labour participation of women is an explicit goal of the European Union’s Lisbon agenda. It sets a very ambitious target for female employment, especially in southern Europe, where women tend to stay at home more.

Yes, this is a well-known point– that women have more elastic supply, and it immediately follows they should be taxed less. Unless– the big unless– you think it’s good that women stay home and take care of their own kids, which I do. If they go to work, the kids are brought up with less adult attention and by people with less talent and interest. Thus, the kids are the losers.

Also, lower taxes on women would reduce their pretax wages, not increase them. There would be the direct Ec-10 effect, and also if more women enter the labor force, they’ll compete their wages down. Post-tax wages do have to increase.

Via CA, this quiz is an unusual one:

R. Amir and M. Knauff’s Ranking Economics Deparments Worldwide on the Basis of PHD Placement, which I found via Greg Mankiw’s Blog, has some surprising conclusions about departmental influence. Harvard and MIT rank at the top, with scores of 100 and 93, which is not surprising. But then there is a huge dropoff, with Stanford, Princeton , CHicago, Berkeley and Yale at 38, 37, 35, 30, 29. There is another giant dropoff to Northwestern, Oxford, LSE, Minnesota, Penn at 9 to 12. Michigan is at 7. Cambridge, Penn State and Rochester are at 5. And it goes down from there.

The New York magazine article, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids,” has some good points. The best is that kids see through insincere praise:

Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies where children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.

New York University professor of psychiatry Judith Brook explains that the issue for parents is one of credibility. “Praise is important, but not vacuous praise,” she says. “It has to be based on a real thing—some skill or talent they have.” Once children hear praise they interpret as meritless, they discount not just the insincere praise, but sincere praise as well.

“Compensating Variations” by Alex Tabarrok says something sensible on the subject of the immorality of compensating workers for the lifting of the trade barriers with which they had long been looting their fellow citizens:

The British Parliament was debating how much slave owners should be compensated for their losses, 20 million pounds as it turned out, when a furious John Stuart Mill rose to his feet thundering, “I should have thought it was the slaves who should be compensated.”

I am reminded of this story, which is probably apocryphal, whenever I hear about how we must compensate “the losers” from globalization. Really? Why should they get any compensation at all?

Imagine that transportation costs fall so that Joe buys his shoes from China. Why do lower transportation costs impose an obligation on Joe to compensate Mary, a U.S. shoe maker? If transportation costs rise (say because the price of oil increases) does Mary have an obligation to compensate Joe?

Or imagine that tariffs have long protected the shoe industry and now the tariffs are lifted allowing Joe to save some money. Why does this impose an obligation on Joe to compensate Mary? Indeed, shouldn’t Mary have to compensate Joe? After all because of the tariffs for many years Joe had to labor extra hours to buy shoes – shouldn’t Joe be compensated for this injustice?

Voting Rights Turnabout A victory for disfranchised Mississippi voters–and they happen to be white. from the WSJ:

Last week a federal district judge found direct evidence that the political machine in Noxubee County, Miss., had discriminated against voters with the intent to infringe their rights and that “these abuses have been racially motivated.”

Among the abuses catalogued by Judge Tom Lee were the paying of notaries public to visit voters and illegally mark their absentee ballots, manipulation of the registration rolls, importation of illegal candidates to run for county office, and publication of a list of voters, classified by race, who might have their ballots challenged. The judge criticized state political officials for being “remiss” in addressing the abuses. The U.S. Justice Department, which sued Noxubee officials under the Voting Rights Act, has called conditions there “the most extreme case of racial exclusion seen by the [department's] Voting Section in decades.”…

Joseph Rich, the chief of Justice’s voting section until he resigned in 2005 to join the liberal Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, has said he thinks the Noxubee case had merit but wonders if it was “really a question of priority” for a department with limited resources. “The Civil Rights Division’s core mission is to fight racial discrimination,” Mr. Rich told TPMuckracker.com. “That doesn’t seem to be happening in this administration.”

More than 20% of the county’s ballots were routinely cast by absentee voters, despite requirements that everyone have a valid excuse to obtain one. A major reason for their proliferation was that Mr. Brown, in his capacity as head of the Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee, would pay notaries public to complete absentee ballots for voters, sometimes without their knowledge or consent. According to Judge Lee, Mr. Brown and his allies then “put in place a nearly all black force of poll workers and managers, over whom they had effective influence and control, and who, under Brown’s direction, ignored or rejected proper challenges to the ballots of black voters.”…

Mr. Brown also went through the absentee ballots in other precincts the night before the Aug. 26, 2003, runoff and put Post-it notes on some ballots with instructions indicating they should be rejected. Judge Lee found that “witnesses who saw the yellow stickers maintained that every sticker seen was on the ballot of a white voter.”

The boss left nothing to chance. Witnesses testified that on the day of the runoff, as voters cast ballots in person at polling stations, poll workers walked up unsolicited to black voters “taking their ballots and marking them without consulting the voters.” Terry Grassaree, the chief deputy sheriff for the county, threatened Samuel Heard, a candidate for sheriff against Mr. Grassaree’s boss, that “I’ll put your ass in jail” after Mr. Heard complained about illegal distribution of campaign literature at the polls.

Mr. Brown sounded like Huey Long when he explained his actions. “This isn’t Mississippi state law you’re dealing with,” he told Libby Abrams, a poll watcher for Mr. Heard, Ms. Abrams testified. “This is Ike Brown’s law.” When Ms. Abrams responded that she planned to have four poll watchers on hand as votes were counted, Mr. Brown told her “Fine, fine, have as many as you want. I’ll send the police on around to arrest you.”

Remember this when people say that election fraud is not really a problem, just something that Republicans claim is a problem.

From Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18.

If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances… With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.

Airmen have a clever place to put their pens, though this one
told me he had to rip off an obscuring pocket cover.

I found an interesting list of murder rates per capita
here.

#1 Colombia 0.617847 per 1,000 people

#2 South Africa 0.496008 per 1,000 people

#3 Jamaica 0.324196 per 1,000 people

#4 Venezuela 0.316138 per 1,000 people

#5 Russia 0.201534 per 1,000 people

#6 Mexico 0.130213 per 1,000 people

#7 Estonia 0.107277 per 1,000 people

#8 Latvia 0.10393 per 1,000 people

#9 Lithuania 0.102863 per 1,000 people

#10 Belarus 0.0983495 per 1,000 people

#14 Thailand 0.0800798 per 1,000 people

#19 Costa Rica 0.061006 per 1,000 people

#23 Bulgaria 0.0445638 per 1,000 people

#24 United States 0.042802 per 1,000 people

I forget who painted this picture from the National Gallery in
Washington. It was hard to photograph, being in a stairwell.

Orin Kerr writes at Volokh Conspiracy:

A lot of recent news stories echo the claim that the Bush Administration has improperly politicized hiring of career lawyers at the Justice Department (DOJ). There’s an interesting question lurking in these stories: Should a lawyer’s views of public policy play any role in whether they are hired? And specifically, if an attorney is applying for a position enforcing a politically controversial set of laws, should the attorney’s view about those laws enter into whether they should be hired for a career lawyer slot?

At first blush, it’s easy to say the answer is “no, those views should never matter.” And perhaps that’s the right answer. But I think there are actually some interesting issues lurking here, and I wanted to offer a hypothetical that I hope will illustrate them….

The question arises because it seems that 2001-2003 the young lawyers hired for the Justice Dept. who went to the Civil Rights Division had 0% Federalist Society members (in a conservative Republican Administration, the Ashcroft Justice Department!) and in 2004-2006 they were 40% of the hires. Democrats claim the 40% is a scandal, I think the 0% is a scandal, and Republicans, meek as always, are silent. This comes from thoughts I’ve had in studying the Japanese judiciary, a civil service system. My conclusion is that politics definitely should enter, and it is even acceptable to use political affiliation.

The specific issue now in the limelight is whether political appointees should defer to career civil servants in the hiring of new civil servants. The answer is clear: NO. If the political appointee defers, the hiring does not get less partisan. Rather, the opposite. Just think about the incentives. If the political appointee hires substandard new lawyers just because they support his political views, he will be criticized, and it will hurt his advancement. If the civil servant hires substandard new lawyers just because they support his political views, he will be criticized much less, and any criticism won’t matter, because his career is not in politics and he has a safe job till retirement. He can be as partisan as he wants. Knowing this, who will bother to criticize him? It’s useless, since he doesn’t have to listen.

(more…)